By Jim Merritt & Sarah Donsbach
What will diplomas look like for Hoosier students entering high school in 2025? Secretary of Education Dr. Katie Jenner and the State Board of Education have spent a great deal of time listening to teachers, parents, and students about possible new options to offer students new paths to earn their diploma. Dr. Jenner and the board are now developing those new high school diploma requirements.
Clearly, the education and workforce world has changed dramatically in years gone by. We are finally giving kids who want to pursue options outside of 2- or 4-year college programs a pathway to get meaningful work-based training and certifications so they can be better prepared to enter the workforce directly after high school.
If we look at historical data of college attendance in Indiana, we can see that college attendance has been on the decline for almost a decade. According to data obtained from the IDOE website, the 2014 cohort had 64.8% of students who were accepted into college, that number dropped to 58.4% for the 2019 cohort and to an all-time low of 52.8% for the 2022 cohort. The decline in students who are college bound has brought us to the current discussion around work-based learning and Career and Technical Education (CTE) options for students in high school.
The questions that face Dr. Jenner and the board are two-fold. First, how does Indiana move forward with these new pathways for our students who want to pursue work-based training and CTE credentials and make their diploma requirements relevant to their chosen career path, while also continuing to provide our students who want to pursue post-secondary education with coursework that is relevant and rigorous in its content to prepare them to be competitive in college admissions? We cannot sacrifice one pathway for the other and as we have learned that life after high school is not one size fits all.
The second question is huge: ACCESS. Many barriers challenge our fellow Hoosiers in rural and small communities. Some barriers may include issues relating to geographic proximity to relevant work-based learning and training opportunities, transportation for students to these employer locations when extreme distance is a factor. Will there be an adequate number of employers to handle the volume of students required to have work-based learning credits? Barriers also exist for our small and rural communities when it comes to student opportunities to enroll in high level and high rigor coursework. A small high school with a total student population of 500 cannot offer coursework such as Intro to Neuroscience, Quantitative Reasoning, Aerospace Engineering, Comparative Religions or Constitutional Law because they can’t afford to have a class section with 15 or less students. More rural areas still struggle to have access to reliable internet service which limits access to dual credit opportunities for students.
Indiana is, indeed, in the throes of reimagining what high school will look like for the class of 2029 and beyond. It’s important to support Dr. Jenner and the Department of Education with their continued innovations and new diploma requirements for students who desire a work-based or CTE pathway, while also continuing to support our college minded students. Lastly, in 2024 with all the advances in technology,solving the limitations of Hoosier students access to educational opportunities because of the size of their school, district, and/or townmust be accomplished.
